Want to found a startup? Work at one first • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to found a startup? Work at one first

#151

Post by qqqwerty » Thu, Sep 01, 2022, 3:42 PM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #147

qqqwerty wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is more more useful than having a longer runway from big co savings? Doubtful. Having worked at a startup before, I now know to never risk a substantial amount of my own money on the venture. The risk of failure is too high. I would either a) go the side project->bootstrap route or b) have angel or accelerator money lined up, which should be easy because having worked at a startup before, my network now includes an…

What position were you in that you worked closely with the marketing team and the angel investors? I was a dev, so I never interacted with either of those groups closely. And when I started my own startup our dev doesn't really interact with marketing and has never met our investors.

Engineer. Employee #7. Maybe as an addendum to my above comments, my startup is fairly open about all of our operations. Other than peoples salaries, pretty much everything about the company is discussed at our all hands. Additionally I just like to ask people what they are working on. It is a good conversation starter.

Maybe another lesson here, is if you are running a startup, consider oversharing with your employees. A fair number of them may be there because they are trying to figure out if the next step for them is founding a company. And oversharing is a good way to keep them engaged. I have been at my current startup for 6-7 years, and would definitely not have stuck around this long had I not felt like I was learning much.

Re: Want to found a startup? Work at one first

#152

Post by qqqwerty » Thu, Sep 01, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

ido wrote: post #99

qqqwerty wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is way more than one lesson to learn from each startup. You will hopefully learn how to hire (and possibly fire) people. You will get insight into the nitty gritty of keeping the lights on at a company (taxes, payroll, office leases, etc...), and you will get familiar with the typical fundraising cycle. Most people don't appreciate how fast 18 months to two years of funding can run out. Going through that stuff…

I've worked at multiple startups before starting my own, some were more useful than others. In my experience only in lead or above positions do you actually get exposure to these things - a random IC doesn't really get much insight into the company's finances, raising, negotiations, hiring, etc. From those I was a lead at I got some valuable experience (including what not to do) & also contacts (some former director/…

Fair enough. I am an IC, but also an early-ish employee. And the startup I currently work at might be anomalous in how much they share about the company. With that said, if you are joining a startup to get founder level experiences, you almost certainly have some agency in this matter (that is kinda the point of working at a startup after all, you get more input and higher level input than at BigCo.) Go out and talk to folks about what they are working on. Ask the founders to share details about the company, including board slides, financial details, and product initiatives. If they don't oblige, it probably makes sense to work somewhere else.

Re: Want to found a startup? Work at one first

#153

Post by onemiketwelve » Thu, Sep 01, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

jchonphoenix wrote: post #57

I've worked at multiple startups sub 50 to >1000 (unicorn status) and have founded and sold my own company. I've also worked at a few of the FAANGs. This is common advice, especially among VCs since it's one of the key benefits used to pitch prospective employees on giving up that fat FAANG salary, but in my personal experience, it's not so cut and dry. Working in a startup will brand you as a startup person and help…

I disagree, my very first job was at a startup in lieu of a big company. I think I was very naive at the time and thought I knew how things worked coming out of business school. I learned tons of what not to do and saw what I thought were pretty big mistakes like not having tests, not talking to customers and actively saying no to user requests. And despite all this, the company was still afloat and was still growing.

It gave me a lot of hope tbh that you can make several mistakes and still have a decent shot.

And I learned tons of what to do correctly. I saw what "rockstar" engineers were actually. I drank from a firehose from a tech standpoint.

Re: Want to found a startup? Work at one first

#154

Post by testmasterflex » Thu, Sep 01, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #133

testmasterflex wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That bank quote is too funny! What was the product if one may ask?

A rather unique take on spreadsheets that would wind up influencing others to try experimentations on the spreadsheet idea, but all were ultimately killed by Excel, as what happened to us. Search "trapeze spreadsheet" on google if you care to know more.

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Re: Want to found a startup? Work at one first

#155

Post by As_You_Wish » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 6:46 AM UTC

jchonphoenix wrote: post #57

I've worked at multiple startups sub 50 to >1000 (unicorn status) and have founded and sold my own company. I've also worked at a few of the FAANGs. This is common advice, especially among VCs since it's one of the key benefits used to pitch prospective employees on giving up that fat FAANG salary, but in my personal experience, it's not so cut and dry. Working in a startup will brand you as a startup person and help…

>Not particularly great advice though, because then the challenge becomes identify those startups.

Only 1 out of 100 companies, if that, VCs invest in don't go out of business. Even with their ton of experience, their smart people, and all kinds of opportunities that you don't have, it's little more than guesswork on their side.

Trying to look for what is going to be a successful startup is a fool's errand. Pure luck.

Re: Want to found a startup? Work at one first

#156

Post by Willish42 » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 8:02 PM UTC

jchonphoenix wrote: post #57

I've worked at multiple startups sub 50 to >1000 (unicorn status) and have founded and sold my own company. I've also worked at a few of the FAANGs. This is common advice, especially among VCs since it's one of the key benefits used to pitch prospective employees on giving up that fat FAANG salary, but in my personal experience, it's not so cut and dry. Working in a startup will brand you as a startup person and help…

This is much more well-put than I'd have managed to write. Had a couple years of startup experience and I feel like the instability and "wrong lessons" were too much for me personally. IMO a lot of people conflate working in a startup with the experience of being a more senior engineer becoming a founder or early employee with similar levels of autonomy. I worked in roles during my first ~5 years where I was the 4th or 5th engineer and was basically given narrowly-defined tasks to complete, with no great guidance on accomplishing them, and with my coworkers too busy to document or explain how to do basic things like run parts of the codebase locally, connect to the db, etc.

You can get a lot better mentorship in those more "boring" traditional jobs at larger companies. You can get that in a startup environment too, but depending on the startup the degree to which that's actually something people prioritize and have capacity for varies wildly. I guess I'd recommend trying smaller startup environments if you happen to already know everything about their tech stack and/or have a decent amount of experience as a SWE already. Both are probably useful but I've personally gotten a lot better ROI growth-wise when working on an established team with stable goals, time to mentor, document, write tests, etc.